VIBRANT PORTRAITS FROM LATE-QING CHINA
[CHINA.]
A collection of 46 Chinese watercolour miniatures on pith.
[Canton?, c. 1870].
Each miniature c. 75 x 50 mm; mounted two to a side on 12 late-nineteenth-century card mounts (each mount 135 x 185 mm); a few portraits slightly scuffed or smudged, one mount split but holding, otherwise very good; preserved in a modern blue morocco-backed cloth box, ‘Chinese Scenes’ gilt to spine.
A series of delicate portraits – the colours beautifully preserved – of a wide range of figures from late-Qing China. The persons portrayed include tradesmen and -women, labourers, dignitaries, scholars, actors, soldiers, figures in ceremonial dress, monks, musicians, and gentlefolk attended by servants – all depicted in the vibrant dress of the time.
Illustrations of this kind were intended for the Western market and represented ‘a pervasive part of the visual world of the Victorians and their contemporaries and had considerable influence on the western image of China’ (Clunas, p. 7). The images show signs of influence by European painting, particularly in the use of shadow. However ‘the core of the subjects depicted in export watercolours is based on the authentic ground of the Chinese realm, with its society, way of life, institutions, celebrations, beliefs, economy, costumes, habits, and so on … Chinese export watercolours are a legitimate part of Chinese artistic heritage, as well as a precious historical and anthropological record of Chinese civilization’ (Carbone, p. 179).
Often erroneously called ‘rice paper’, pith was used extensively in Cantonese export art of the nineteenth century. Lightweight and easy to transport (and therefore favoured by travellers), the material’s cellular structure also allows for fine detail and a particularly bright finish. These features, together with storage in albums rather than in the open, make miniatures such as these some of the most vivid and best-preserved artefacts from the nineteenth-century Sino-Western trade.
See Iside Carbone, Glimpses of China through the Export Watercolours of the 18th–19th Centuries: a Selection from the British Museum’s Collection (2002); Craig Clunas, Chinese Export Watercolours (1984).
